chool.
There were usually a few grown-up lads under his tuition--careful
sailors, that had stayed ashore during the winter quarter to study
navigation as a science,--or tall fellows, happy in the patronage of the
great, who, in the hope of being made excisemen, had come to school to
be initiated in the mysteries of gauging,--or grown young men, who, on
second thoughts, and somewhat late in the day, had recognised the Church
as their proper vocation; and these used to speak of the master's
acquirements and teaching ability in the very highest terms. He himself,
too, could appeal to the fact, that no teacher in the north had ever
sent more students to college, and that his better scholars almost
always got on well in life. But then, on the other hand, the pupils who
wished to do nothing--a description of individuals that comprised fully
two-thirds of all the younger ones--were not required to do much more
than they wished; and parents and guardians were loud in their
complaints that he was no suitable schoolmaster for them; though the
boys themselves usually thought him quite suitable enough.

He was in the habit of advising the parents or relations of those he
deemed his clever lads, to give them a classical education; and meeting
one day with Uncle James, he urged that I should be put on Latin. I was
a great reader, he said; and he found that when I missed a word in my
English tasks, I almost always substituted a synonym in the place of it.
And so, as Uncle James had arrived, on data of his own, at a similar
conclusion, I was transferred from the English to the Latin form, and,
with four other boys, fairly entered on the "Rudiments." I laboured with
tolerable diligence for a day or two; but there was no one to tell me
what the rules meant, or whether they really meant anything; and when I
got on as far as _penna_, a pen, and saw how the changes were rung on
one poor word, that did not seem to be of more importance in the old
language than in the modern one, I began miserably to flag, and to long
for my English reading, with its nice amusing stories, and its
picture-like descriptions. The Rudiments was by far the dullest book I
had ever seen. It embodied no thought that I could perceive,--it
certainly contained no narrative,--it was a perfect contrast to not only
the "Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," but to even the
Voyages of Cook and Anson. None of my class-fellows were by any means
bright;--they had been a